


the very breath of heat that sets your lungs alight

by Hannah



Series: Set Off Like Geese [3]
Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Autism, Canon Character of Color, Gen, M/M, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-02
Updated: 2019-06-02
Packaged: 2020-04-06 14:20:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19064419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hannah/pseuds/Hannah
Summary: The thing about the beach in February – any beach in the city, not just Santa Monica but all the sand up against the ocean – was that yeah, it got as cold as it ever did in LA, but also, all the tourists were gone. If you went to the beach in February, you meant business being there.





	the very breath of heat that sets your lungs alight

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [yourlibrarian](https://yourlibrarian.dreamwidth.org/) and [flamingsword](https://flamingsword.dreamwidth.org/) for beta-reading, and [sidewaystime](https://sidewaystime.tumblr.com/) for a last-minute read-through. Title comes from [Tinsnip](https://tinsnip.tumblr.com/)’s interpretation of the lyrics to “Could I Be Your Girl” by Jan Arden.

The thing about the beach in February – any beach in the city, not just Santa Monica but all the sand up against the ocean – was that yeah, it got as cold as it ever did in LA, but also, all the tourists were gone. If you went to the beach in February, you meant business being there. Alonna could respect that. She wasn’t going into the water, but she appreciated not having to squeeze past dozens of people from Wisconsin or Montana just to get a little sand to herself. 

It was the best time to grab your friends and head out for an afternoon, maybe stay through the evening – light a fire, eat some food, drink some beer. Or real-sugar Mexican sodas, if you were getting sober like Frank and Letitia were doing. Going to the beach in sweatshirts and jeans wasn’t exactly the picture everyone had of Los Angeles, but it was the one she liked best. She and Gunn did it that way as kids, and they did it now as grown-ups. He did it for the younger kids at the shelter, sometimes. Make sure they knew the beach was there, even if they weren’t going into the water because the Pacific got goddamn freezing in winter. As cold as anything in LA ever got.

This time of year, the only people you could count on getting into the water were surfers. The hardcore ones with wetsuits up to their chins and down to their wrists and ankles, who weren’t missing any chance to catch that one perfect wave.

Okay, the hardcore surfers and her brother’s boyfriend.

“That man is crazy,” she said to Gunn, watching Wesley honest to goodness _dive under the water_ without even a surfer’s winter wetsuit. He’d gone in wearing a pair of trunks. “More than just plain white-people crazy. I mean seriously insane.”

Gunn shrugged, laughed, “Not like I didn’t warn him. He wants to freeze his dick off, that’s not my problem.”

 _You sure about that?_ She let the thought flap through her mind, then laughed along with him.

Wesley didn’t immediately sprint back out, which she had to admit took some serious balls of steel. She balanced her plate on her lap and ate her tacos carefully while she watched him swimming and splashing around. He was staying in longer than if he’d been trying to prove a point or win a bet, swimming like it was June and the water was perfect instead of the what-felt-like-freezing waves right now. She wasn’t going to admire the guy for being crazy like that, but she’d be willing to admit it was kind of impressive. A weird, crazy impressive that nobody needed to show off being able to do was still impressive. She could give him that.

He eventually came out of the water shivering, teeth chattering, grabbing a towel and wrapping it tight around his shoulders before heading off to the bathroom to get changed. Once he’d showered and put on normal clothes, he sat down next to her with his own plate of roach coach tacos. As he took a big bite out of one, steam escaping and rushing up to the overcast sky, she asked him, “You don’t care that it’s freezing?”

“I like being in the water more than I dislike being cold,” he said. Not with his mouth full, like a regular person: he’d chewed and swallowed and _then_ answered her. “It seems a shame to live here and not take advantage of the ocean as much as I can. Though I expect you’re used to it, having grown up here. You must come here often.”

“Not so much these days, but yeah. You know you can head out here, you don’t feel like you’ve got to do it every week. You’re right, though. Sometimes you’ve got to get your beach hours in.”

The way Gunn explained it, Wesley was the nephew of somebody close to an old friend of someone else that worked at the shelter. They’d met because Anne’s old friend that’d known her from way before LA dropped by the shelter to say hi because she was in town. Wesley just happened to have been along for the ride. Alonna knew it wasn’t as LA a story as it could’ve been, but it was still pretty far up there. Because Wesley wasn’t just a person Gunn met some random afternoon. It wasn’t a one-time thing. Wesley was someone Gunn went to see again. Again and again, a regular thing. He showed him the non-tourist parts of LA, the ugly parts and hidden spaces. Helping him out with things, the stuff that guidebooks and moving instructions didn’t tell people, like how out on the West Coast, checkout people meant it when they asked how you were doing. The way Wesley told it, in England, you just bought your stuff and left.

When she’d finally met him, he turned out to be almost exactly what she pictured after Gunn described him to her: tall white guy, plain brown hair, glasses and an evil villain accent right out of a bad action movie. She got what it was about him, though. Got it right away. He’d smiled and been completely polite and respectful to her in everything he did – yeah, he stayed a moment to hold the door open for her, and on the flip side, he’d been careful about not making eye contact last too long.

He was a decent guy, a smart guy, an all-around okay person, and he was weird. There wasn’t a better word for it. He let people laugh about him swimming in the ocean in February because he liked swimming more than he cared about fitting into the group. He rode a motorcycle instead of trying to get a car because it was easier, and never thought about looking cool. He fumbled his words and stumbled around the right thing to say, and he didn’t over-correct himself the way most white people did. She could tell it wasn’t for the usual reasons. Something about the way he looked at people told her that. He looked at them carefully – not if they were threats or friends, not like that. Just, he wanted to figure out what to say, and be careful about doing it right. He usually did okay.

“How’s your thesis coming?” Alonna asked, pushing the last bits of lettuce around before picking them up carefully to eat from her fingertips. Thesis, what a word. The first time he’d said it, she’d pretended she knew what it meant. That, and stuff like _anthropology_ and _doctoral dissertation regarding religious imperialism and native cultural adaptations and developments_. Then he’d gone on to explain – not in a lording-it-over-her way, a let-me-share-it way – that it was how sometimes, conquering nations didn’t wipe out everyone in their path, but instead let their own culture mix into what they found. Mostly it was the Spanish that did that. The rest of Europe usually just killed everyone right away and took all their stuff. And he was writing a big, long paper on the whole thing to try to say something about it that nobody’d ever said before.

“Quite well, thank you. I’ve almost completed the current round of revisions, so I expect to have something worth submitting and defending in the next few months. But there’s no predicting what might happen in the meantime.”

“That makes it what, two years? Is that a long time for something like this?”

“Not usually, no. And – yourself? Charles tells me the new position at the studio is coming along nicely for you.”

“Yeah, I am. Thanks.” A lot of it was gofer work, get this, grab that, bring me the thing, give it here. It kept her on her feet most of the day and now that she was someone who made things happen, she’d started hating how people never thought about what went into making things happen. Small things like coffee and film stock were still things. Maybe she’d stop coming home tired all the time after she was more used to it. Got a little seniority and didn’t have to rush around for everything, just walk.

And: _Charles_. His accent made it slip around easily, changing her brother’s name from something that only got summoned in times of serious rule-breaking trouble into something fond and familiar, _Charles_. A few times she’d hear him say it like he wanted to wrap his tongue around it and swallow it down. Not even their mom called her son Charles unless she had to raise holy hell about something he’d done. Their grandmother, Charlie, a few times. But never Charles. 

Alonna kicked her heels against the concrete, pushed the toes of her right shoe into the sand. “I keep thinking, it’s work I can do, so I shouldn’t complain too much.”

“Indeed not. I’m glad to hear it’s working out for you.”

“And hey, maybe they’ll actually let me help set up a lighting rig one of these days.”

She knew, and she wasn’t going to say, because it wasn’t something to talk about. She’d found her brother’s magazines years ago. Playboys, mostly. A few Maxims thrown in there, a couple titles that he couldn’t ever claim to be reading for the articles. He’d hidden them carefully. Hidden them with exactly the right amount of secret that they wouldn’t be found unless you were looking, but not so hidden that you wouldn’t ever find them. But they weren’t messed with the way she’d seen other stashes of those things. No folds, no creases, no stains on the centerfolds made as only a man can. He’d bought those magazines to have them, and to hide them, and for people to find them. Not to read them. If he had that kind of magazine for reading, he’d hidden those to _really_ hide them. 

She’d seen him with guys. With Pedro, with Seth, with Marcus – and he’d been careful with them, real careful. Most people probably couldn’t have told, but he was her _brother_. It’d been them against the world for so long, there wasn’t any way she couldn’t know.

Like tonight, bringing over some beers, sitting down next to Wesley and smiling gently at him, more gently than he smiled at anyone that wasn’t her. They clinked their bottles together, all of them saying _cheers_ because that was the same in London and Los Angeles. She drank hers carefully, still having to focus on where to move her hand to bring the bottle to her lips – trying to focus more on the sunset and the beer than her brother doing the most subtle man-flirting she’d ever seen him do. Maybe that was why he got on so well with such a pasty white British guy. You work from the same level of not saying anything, there’d probably be some common language there.

It bugged her that he was this easy, this happy, with someone whose name was honest-to-God Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, not just an accent for an action movie villain but a perfect name for one to boot. But she liked him, too. Mostly because when they met, he’d looked at her but didn’t stare. New people tended to over-work not seeing her missing arm, or make it obvious they were deliberately avoiding it. She preferred little kids for that – at least they were honest about wanting to know what happened to her right arm below the elbow. _I got an infection, so the doctors had to cut it off._ But he’d been, if not cool with it, working to make sure he’d become okay with it. She figured Gunn had told him about it ahead of time. If he’d told Wesley about it, that meant he’d wanted things to be okay when they finally met. It might be because this one meant something more.

It meant that maybe…No. It wasn’t her place to bring it up. But if Gunn wanted to mention it, she’d be glad to hear him say it out loud.

For now, it was them with friends on the beach, beers and sunsets and the smoke from the firepit, there was her brother being happy and there was her being happy for him.


End file.
